FREE chapter of Canal House Cooking, Vol. 4 below!

The bursting flavors of summer fruits and vegetables can be made to last all year by canning and preserving them. Canning can brighten your pantry throughout the year, extending the life of perishable produce and utilizing those fruit and vege ‘gluts’ that can sometimes occur when growing food at home.

We don’t eat a lot of fish because of its very high price here. But, on occasion, we pick up 1 kilo or so of Fresh Water Basa Fillets from our local supermarket for around $7.85 per kilo. Here’s a very elegant dish which I threw together with some ingredients we had on hand.

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Another dish mainly made up of pantry items, plus 600g of mutton leg steaks which are always very affordable at the local supermarket – sometimes around $5 a kilo. As per my usual Chinese stir-fry method, the mutton was very finely sliced against the grain while very cold – actually not quite fully defrosted – as this helps achieve a very fine slice. The slices were then mixed into the mystical veleveting mixture for true-to-Chinese-takeaway authenticity. Here’s the full recipe – note: you could also use beef, chicken, lamb or pork for this recipe instead of mutton.

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Here’s a great-tasting, super-easy chicken recipe that I threw together the other day for an early dinner. This dish started with a corn-feed chicken which was on special at our local supermarket – about $6.00 for a 1.5kg bird. Marsala is a sweet, aromatic fortified wine. If you can’t find it you could use a medium-dry or a sweet sherry instead.

This is another recipe utilizing more leftovers from Christmas – this time leftover frozen cooked prawns, tinned asparagus and pouring cream. You could certainly use uncooked prawns, however, and fresh asparagus too if you have those instead. The sauce is made using a strained stock consisting of the leftover prawn heads and shells, boiled up with garlic, a bay leaf, and some peppercorns. The result was a rich and very tasty essence of prawn that really delivers the taste of the sea to your sauces. Here are the recipes for the stock/essence, the creamy garlic prawns and asparagus, and the pilaf…

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This dish is a Christmas-time favourite in my family. The creamy curry mayonnaise completely envelops the scrumptiously hard-boiled eggs and crunchy iceberg lettuce. It’s a creamy eggy lettucey delight. You would think that the mayonnaise and sour cream content would make the dish overbearingly creamy and rich, but in fact it’s incredibly delicious and moreish. Here is the recipe I used…